View Slide Show18 Photographs

Recalling the ‘Right Coast,’ Before the Storm

By David GonzalezNov. 15, 2012Nov. 15, 2012

Susannah Ray loves surfing, but she does not miss it. She misses home.

For her, that’s Rockaway Beach — off the bay on Beach 91 Street to be exact — along a stretch of Queens that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Shortly after moving there around 2005, she got into the surf scene, then slowly began to document her seaside friends and neighbors in a project she called “Right Coast.”

Looking at what’s left, little feels right. Houses flooded, blocks burned, lights, water and sometimes hope itself vanished. The natural beauty that entranced and attracted her to the area eventually wreaked heartbreaking havoc.

“There is something a little elegiac for me to look a those pictures,” she said last week, as plumbers fixed the heat and hot water systems in her home, which had flooded to the basement ceiling. “These photos were never intended to glorify surfing. Now they’re about saying this is another community that has been disrupted, maybe even irreparably damaged by the force of the waves. These pictures were a kind of love song to the Rockaways. Now, they’re almost like a dirge.”

She had been living in Brooklyn, working as a freelance photo printer during a break as a college photography teacher, when she was looking for a change of landscape, both personal and neighborhood. She had read about the Rockaways and decided she was ready for something new. She first ventured out to Long Beach, just over the county line, but it was hard to get to her surfing lessons without a car.

She crossed back.

“I liked Long Beach, but it felt like Nassau County,” said Ms. Ray, 40, who now teaches at Hofstra University. “Rockaway is New York City. It’s an amazing, wonderful weird, dirty, beautiful place. It has it’s own strange magic.”

At first she took a share in a bungalow. She cast her lot with the locals in 2005, moving there permanently. She met her husband — a fellow surfer — at a Manhattan bar where he and other Rockaway Beach denizens gathered during the winter. They married, bought a house and had a baby.

She had slowly made her way into the surfing community — careful to be respectful and not barge in like some overeager outsider. She stayed to herself, though a few more seasoned types took her under their wings. She also kept her cameras tucked away for about a year, until the community’s mix of urban and ocean, lifers and newcomers, blue-collar bungalows and hardscrabble housing projects got to her one day as she saw her friends after surfing.

“Everybody was changing wetsuits on the sidewalk,” she recalled. “There was something about being half-undressed with cars, and buildings and the boardwalk. All these strange juxtapositions started speaking to me. I come out of a landscape background, and that was the predominant feeling in a lot of them. I worked on them for 8 years, and a lot of those disparate elements started feeding the project.”

Some of those images have capture that sweep, where brick towers edge into the frame along with the head of a surfer riding a wave (Slide 4). Others were more formal and detail-driven, as she experimented with portraits and still lifes.

“There was a deepening of knowing what and who was there, and seeing patterns of symbolism related to surfing,” she said. “There’s one image of a plastic lei hanging on a wall in the bungalow I used to share. It’s a barren image. The lei is associated with warmth, aloha and Hawaii. It’s a far cry from what we experienced out here.”

What they went through in recent weeks had been equally remote.

She and her family lived on the bay side of her street, which had never flooded as far as she knew. Last year they heeded warnings about Hurricane Irene and stayed with relatives in New Jersey. Their basement flooded while they slept. Their home in the Rockaways was untouched.

They stayed during Sandy, escaping personal harm, even though their basement flooded. For now, she and her family are staying in Manhattan with her parents. She is not complaining. But she wonders what it will be like when they return.

Until then, they have made trips to the block, joining a tight-knit group of neighbors who share not just a long driveway behind their homes, but a common purpose to rebuild and recover.

“Right now, surfing and being in the water in that playful or poetic way is the last thing on my or my husband’s minds,” she said. “There are now these very elemental human needs that have come to the forefront. We are trying to get our houses habitable, and who knows when that will be? And then there is this nagging fear will it happen again in our lifetime — not when we’re 99, but in five years. I do not want to go through this again.”